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WBraun
climber
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Feb 19, 2019 - 05:04pm PT
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Good grief.
You are stuck in THE deep cave with no light ....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 19, 2019 - 08:40pm PT
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How is the value of "knowing" contingent on our evolutionary success?
who decides what is valuable?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 20, 2019 - 08:07am PT
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eeyonkee channeling Gazzaniga: As I look at James’s work now, I recognize a schema that fits the module/layering ideas. James appears to suggest that the structural aspects of instincts are modular.
This is a particular (maybe even peculiar) reading of William James’ writing. What James seemed to have said is that the body generates an emotional feeling from interpretations of external events.
James opened the door and recognized that simulations could generate the same perceptions emotionally. The idea has been picked up by cognitive scientists employing theories of “embodied cognition.” Grounded or embodied cognition says that all concepts (abstract and concrete) come from concerts of bodily sensations FIRST. The idea has been picked-up by Damasio with his notion of somatic markers which assign emotion tags to experiences. (See also Lakoff and Johnson’s book [Metaphors We Live By] on the total pervasiveness and influence of metaphors in everyday language.)
I don’t think modularity cannot be reasonably assigned to James’ writings. It’s a bit of a stretch.
What’s interesting about the James-Lange Theory is that it allows the ability to experience all the effects of real action in simulation, which is an idea that cognitive science has tended to promote over the decades. This, I’d say, undercuts notions that what’s real externally is ascertainably different phenomenologically from experience. (I’ve written a paper on climbing metaphors for business academic audiences that rely upon many of these ideas.)
James and Lange said that first there are interpretations of external perception which lead to emotional states; a view that supports a computer modeling of mind / brain.
Recent research, however, using embodied cognitive views, report (empirically, I might add) that FIRST there is an emotional feeling that arises in the body, and THEN arise interpretations of those feelings. In other words, the chain of events are *backwards* from how we usually think about how we think and feel. It presents just another scientific conundrum for a theory of mind, and it challenges notions of independent and autonomous control of self—free will).
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 20, 2019 - 08:30am PT
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Bottom line is Life itself is NOT digital ever ......
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Trump
climber
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Feb 20, 2019 - 12:12pm PT
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Don’t we already know enough to know that human leveled achievements are rare in the universe? I can count them on one finger! What more do I need to know? Don’t we already know that the bottom line is that life is never digital?
What is it that you think humans need to do in order to know those things? We already do know them! It’s just that they might not be true.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 20, 2019 - 01:06pm PT
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I see that a text-extending learning machine has been turned loose on the MikeL data sample.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 20, 2019 - 03:37pm PT
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From Wiki:
Axel Cleeremans, a professor of cognitive science with the Department of Psychology of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, in his paper "The radical plasticity thesis: how the brain learns to be conscious", proposed the idea that conscious brain is a product of unconscious brain's attempts at predicting the consequences of its actions on the external world. The paper also states that the activity of one cerebral region and its effect on the other regions of the brain. According to "radical plasticity" thesis, thinking and reasoning are the products of the unconscious mind's ability to decipher and process countless possibilities and predict the consequences of taking a certain course of action. In contrast, the conscious mind is only able to process the outcomes of no more than a couple of courses of action during decision making.[12]
The brain unconsciously learns to re-describe its own activity to itself in terms of possibilities and probabilities and generates a method to allow activate certain parts of its anatomy to help engender the most profitable outcome. These learned re-descriptions, enriched by the emotional value associated with them, form the basis of conscious experience.[12]
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 21, 2019 - 09:11am PT
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Largo is in Europe, so we can catch up on digging into many of his criticisms.
One of the criticisms that he's pushed lately has been about "causality," interesting because it appears in a line of thought that falls under the rubric of "Epiphenomenalism," a trend most popular in the late 1800s.
You can read the summary here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/
While it may seem somewhat opposite of what Largo has been pitching, the consequences of rejecting a physical explanation of "Mind" becomes sharper:
"If there is always a sufficient physical cause for whatever a mental event is supposed to produce, then one could never be in a position where one needs to suppose there is anything non-physical at work, and thus there could never be any reason to introduce mental causes into one's account of neural events or behavior."
Interestingly, qualia play a prominent role in the discussion. For instance
"Thus an anti-epiphenomenalist stance would require us to prefer the hypothesis that simple sensations cause (relatively) complex neural events over the hypothesis that complex neural events (that are required in any case for the causation of sensations) are adequate to cause the neural events required for the causation of behavior."
While "preferring a hypothesis" may be legitimate in philosophical arguments, it is not sufficient for a scientific approach, one can test the hypothesis, and in the case of "pain" one finds the article I linked above to be an interesting investigation into the most obvious characterization of pain, that it is unpleasant,
"Pain is an unpleasant experience. How the brain’s affective neural circuits attribute
this aversive quality to nociceptive information remains unknown. By means of time-lapse in vivo calcium imaging and neural activity manipulation in freely behaving mice encountering noxious stimuli, we identified a distinct neural ensemble in the basolateral amygdala that encodes the negative affective valence of pain..."
The scientists conducting this research are most likely entirely unaware of the philosophical debate regarding "qualia," but their results certainly inform the philosophical debate.
To finish this up, the statement of "causal closure:"
physical events that have sufficient causes have sufficient physical causes
brings a better statement of the question.
Largo is arguing otherwise, if I read him correctly, and taking an epiphenomenalism stance.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 21, 2019 - 03:42pm PT
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"Largo is in Europe, so we can catch up on digging into many of his criticisms."
I think John took Peter Lynds' foundational paper on the nature of time with him to unpack, along with his luggage.
Waiting patiently.
;>|
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Feb 21, 2019 - 03:57pm PT
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Although I don't seem to be getting much traction, I feel compelled to correct and expand on my last ordered list. I had:
* Mind
* Awareness
* Consciousness
* Agency
* Intelligence
* Instinct
* Feeling
* Algorithm/Biochemical algorithm
* Life (digital)
* Not life (physical)
I want to change it to:
* Mind
* Consciousness = Awareness
* Intelligence
* Instinct
* Feeling
* Biochemical algorithm
* Life (digital) => Agency
* Algorithm
* Not life (physical)
It's not so much a list as a hierarchy. Each higher member is built on top of (depends on) the member below. You have to incorporate a hierarchical relationship between the key words in order to incorporate evolution into the solution. As of late it has occurred to me that agency is key and starts early. As an agent, you are a survival machine, carrying the family jewels (genes). Your prime directive is to survive and procreate.
Intelligence is the odd man out, once again. That's because we actually need a tree rather than a list to show how intelligence could branch off straight from Life without necessarily having to go through the biochemical algorithm node. I'm defining a biochemical algorithm as an algorithm that involves a non-data processing chemical element like production of a hormone or something. These chemical elemnts are the basis of feelings. Algorithm, on the other hand, covers data processing operations that are more or less pure data processing.
Edit: This is the link to the Michael Gazzaniga reference in my second-to-last post. It is worth reading and not too long.
http://nautil.us/blog/what-william-james-got-right-about-consciousness
He is suggesting that consciousness is an evolved instinct.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 21, 2019 - 09:22pm PT
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I've always thought Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind theory was intriguing.
From Wiki: "According to Jaynes, language is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for consciousness: Language existed thousands of years earlier, but consciousness could not have emerged without language."
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Feb 21, 2019 - 09:24pm PT
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DeepMind update
Could not parse this
Beginning the long and winding road to crow consciousness
Apr 10, 2008 - 07:53pm PT
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah .....
Sob sob sob sob sob .....
oh my oh my oh my ....
fuk fuk fuk
You heard it here first ......
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 22, 2019 - 08:37am PT
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eeyonkee,
There’s probably a reason why you’re not getting much traction.
There’s no reason for Gazzaniga to call back to James. If Gazzaniga has an idea that has merit, he can either promote it as his own idea, or he can simply say that James got things right and let us all read James. On the other hand, saying that James had implied a good idea and then proceed to *interpret* it in *his* way in a casual rendition adds little of substance. If one wants substance, then there are legions of journal articles on the subject of cognition that will offer many different theories and the data to support those theories.
With all due respect, this is the problem (imo) with modernity’s popularizing science for the masses. It’s toothless talk. I can (and you could) provide far more substantiality with personal subjective experiences than anyone could ever get or give with popular writing of another’s thinking. We are all so enamored with science, but almost none of us actually *do* science as a scientist undertakes. In the first instance, it’s easy. A person can just talk and refer loosely to someone else’s concepts. In the latter instance, one must devote resources to expertise and research projects. It’s my experience that research projects to publication takes about 5 years from initial inception to final review.
As for your “ordered list,” you have some conceptual notions, and you’ve come up with a list of them. If you wanted to put some meat on those bones theoretically, you could start to provide the operational linkages between them: what elements get passed on from one concept in the list to another along the list? I assume they’re connected.
I don’t mean to quell the conversation you’re enjoying.
I did read the Gazzaniga article you pointed to. I still don’t see the argument. Perhaps it would be a good idea to review and tell us what the field says instinct is. (You may find that concept as evanescent as consciousness.)
Be well.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 22, 2019 - 10:15am PT
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MikeL,
Whatever he may say, eeyonkee has traction. You could fruitfully re-examine your own strong connection to subjective personal experience. Science and a dependable understanding of the larger world of which we are part requires setting to one side our personal experience and considering what other people have to say as perhaps more relevant and valid.
eeyonkee,
After you did LA chimney how did you go down?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 22, 2019 - 10:43am PT
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I agree with MikeL in general, that the specifics are important and we often frame the questions and answers in terms of what the latest "fad" is... I'm as susceptible as anyone.
For instance, "algorithm" is a concept that is short hand for a particular computational model, initially it was a Von Neumann machine and lately a Turing machine. And while one might prove that some sorts of architectures are reducible to Turing machines, highly parallel real-time architectures exhibit "behaviors" that are difficult (or possibly provably impossible) to predict.
Further, an algorithm can be viewed as an "instruction set" which brings the faddish notion of information into the mix. In so doing, it is easy to mix up the ideas we all have about information with the traditionally engineering view of the field, and without rigor this makes a confusing discussion. For instance, engineers generally do not address the issue of "understanding" information, rather the physical act of transmitting and receiving information.
The issue is one of human bias. "Agency" is a freighted term, describing an object that can "cause" something to happen. And the whole notion of causation gets wrapped up with this idea that generalizes from "me causing something" to the giant black hole in the center of the Milky Way causing the stars to exhibit their particular trajectories around it.
This notion of causality is not the physical one, as it is entirely acceptable to talk about these physical interactions in terms that do not evoke the hand-of-man moving two bodies along a particular trajectory.
Here rigor is your friend, stripping our descriptions of our own peculiar point of view and leaving the most minimal points.
From my thinking, eeyonkee's list compresses the "lower" attributes of behaviors exhibited by life into irrelevance. An interesting exercise would be to list next to each attribute the estimated biomass that exhibits those particular traits.
The fact is that we do not have a good physical view of what life is, and as I've said often this is probably essential for any further discussion.
For instance, Kaufmann's idea of criticality scales across biology from self-reproducing catalysts to planetary ecosystems. If that idea were correct, then there is a physical basis for complexity and order, and a definition of and foundation for complexity in evolution. A good place to work from because it provides rigorous predictions that can be tested.
Talk is cheap, as they say, and I think that is demonstrated in the volume of popular work as compared to rigorous research (which is difficult).
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Feb 22, 2019 - 11:34am PT
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We play in a world of waves. The media in which the waves form is conciousness. What we observe as solid reality is standing waves within narrow frequencies of electromagnetism aka light aka thought forms
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2019 - 12:12pm PT
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Talk is cheap, as they say, and I think that is demonstrated in the volume of popular work as compared to rigorous research (which is difficult).
For sake of better understanding your point, I am curious if you have any examples that might be included in this "volume of popular work" you alluded to.
I mean, there is quite a sweep between The Celestine Prophecy (by James Redfield) and The Big Picture (by Sean Carroll). If this is at all in any way what you're referring to.
...
My difficulty with eeyonkee's list is that it appears he's attempting to assign rigorous definitions to historically nontechnical terms. I don't see that being particularly fruitful, not with the general public and not with this crowd. But if it clarifies concepts in his own mind, all the power to him.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2019 - 01:15pm PT
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A lifelong interest of mine is reading popular works of science. One of the main reasons I've always done this is for their edifying effects on my "worldview". (For lack of a better word.)
Many go to church every week, year after year, decade after decade, for edification, reinforcement of material, etc. Meanwhile, I read popular works of science for the same reasons.
Repetition. It works.
Sometimes hearing / doing something once isn't good enough, we have to hear / do it repeatedly so it sinks in... or else to keep it operational.
Math and engineering concepts come to mind. So do certain climbing moves.
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